The News: Microsoft announced that Sales Copilot, its role-based companion designed for sellers that includes features to help increase productivity and personalize customer interactions, is now generally available as a standalone subscription product or included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise & Premium licenses at no additional cost. Sales Copilot can be accessed in a variety of applications, including Microsoft Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and can connect to other CRM systems such as Salesforce.
In addition, Microsoft announced several new Sales Copilot capabilities, including auto-generated opportunity summaries, including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, inside Dynamics 365 Sales; the ability to create contextual emails, based on your Dynamics 365 Sales data & Microsoft 365 graph; a summary view that includes account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news and more, in Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales; and real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings prompted by competitor or brand mention by the customers to stay ready to handle objections. The new capabilities are rolling out this month.
Further, Microsoft announced two additional copilot capabilities for marketers, which are included in the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights subscription. The new capabilities include the ability to use natural language to orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, and the ability to easily style email, forms, and event registration pages to perfectly match brand guidelines using natural language, so you can deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience. These new capabilities will start rolling out in preview in August, and the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering will be generally available on September 1, 2023.
Microsoft Announces General Availability of Sales Copilot
Analyst Take: Microsoft on July 18 made several announcements related to its Sales Copilot seller assistant, as well as new features that are being incorporated into its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights subscriptions. The new features and benefits are focused around increasing the productivity and efficiency of workers in selling and marketing roles, by leveraging automation, AI insights, and context-aware summarization and recommendation tools. Key among these new features is the incorporation of powerful generative AI tools, as well as the ability to use natural language to handle orchestration tasks and adherence to brand or company style or narratives.
The incorporation of these Copilot tools is extremely important to the success of Microsoft’s enterprise application strategy. Today’s buyers and workers will no longer put up with business applications that require significant investments to be made in training and expect that applications will be as easy to interact with as popular consumer applications.
Driving Efficiency Without Forcing Workflow Changes
Workers are creatures of habit, so a key challenge faced by enterprises is driving efficiency while not interrupting or forcing workflow changes. From a strategic perspective, Microsoft is smartly building out a robust feature and toolset that focuses on reducing the administrative burden on workers, while allowing them to deploy these tools in their preferred application. Incorporating these features in existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise & Premium licenses at no extra cost will provide the incremental added value that SaaS customers have come to expect on a relatively frequent basis.
Further, the ability to purchase Sales Copilot with a standalone license, as well as connect with third-party CRMs such as Salesforce, will help Microsoft gain needed traction in the market for organizations that utilize a variety of application vendors. Given the wide variety of generative AI-based assistants that have come to market, ensuring interoperability may help drive incremental sales revenue with non-Microsoft prospects.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Marketing Features Available Now
In addition to the availability of Sales Copilot, Microsoft announced Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution and continue investments into real-time marketing. Further, Microsoft announced the general availability of several Dynamics 365 Customer Insights copilot capabilities, including Content Ideas, Query Assist, and Dialogue with Data.
According to Microsoft, these features assist marketers with brainstorming marketing copy for email campaigns, creating new targeted marketing segments, and using natural language to infer key insights from customer data and support better business outcomes, respectively. Microsoft said that additional enhancements are on the way in coming months, such as the ability to refresh and improve existing marketing content, and the capability to summarize audience definitions and suggest improvements to simplify definition.
These Sales Copilot and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights features are indicative of a marketing and sales software landscape that remains extremely competitive on a feature set and capabilities basis. The vendors that will see significant success also will be the ones that can roll out these capabilities smoothly, with as few bugs as possible, to reduce or eliminate the friction and frustration often felt when incorporating new functionality.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Microsoft’s Viva Sales, Copilot Driving Productivity Gains for Sales Professionals
Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP is Being Revved up by Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Launches Linux Distribution
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
